An Exploration of the Effectiveness of Infographics in Contrast to Text Documents for Visualizing Census Data: What Works?

The U.S. Census Bureau conducted a usability research study using 3 published Census infographics on different topics containing statistics produced from Census survey data. The study used a mixed-factorial design with repeated measures, comparing user performance (accuracy of information recall and accuracy of searching for information) and satisfaction after using either the 3 infographics, or 3 text documents containing the same information. 55 participants were randomly assigned to either the Infographics condition or the Documents condition, accordingly. Results revealed significant advantage in accuracy for participants with any amount of college education, and a significant interaction between the stimulus type (infographics compared to documents) and the condition (searching versus recall) with infographics being related to increased performance in the searching task and not the recall tasks. However, there were no significant memory-related advantages for infographics above documents, and no interaction between education and stimulus type.